This installment in the Make Money Blogging with… review series will be covering that company that reminds you of a banana; Chitika. Founded in 2003, Chitika is one of the largest contextual advertising networks. The company serves over 2 billion ads per month across more than 34,000 websites.
If you are looking for extremely targeted advertising, then Chitika is where it’s at.
In Their Words
In addition to the revenue opportunities generated from its comprehensive merchandising engine, eMiniMalls offers a more informative window shopping experience in which users can browse and learn about products that are dynamically targeted to the content of the site and their interests in particular — all without having to leave the site.
“We continue to explore ways to further enrich the online experience of our members,” said David Coppins, Vice President, On-Line Mall of Upromise, the country’s largest non-governmental service helping families save for college. “eMiniMalls shows great potential in achieving this goal through its powerful interactive product merchandising service and we expect it will complement our mission of helping families save for a college education.”
In My Words
Chitika is a new, innovative and well respected advertising program. I’m a fan.
Why Chitika Is Not Just Another Adsense Knock-off
To understand why Chitika is a good advertising program you need to understand in which particular situations Google AdSense is just not cuttin’ it. Google AdSense puts everything into displaying relevant ads based upon your blog’s content (contextual advertising). This is good because the ads are tailored to what the reader is already reading; increasing profits for both publishers and advertisers. Ads which are less relevant to what the reader is searching for have lower conversions rates, and ultimately do not produce high levels of revenue.
Now, this is where Chitika sets itself apart from Google Adsense and other contextual advertising programs.
Chitika does not scan the content of the page to display relevant ads. Chitika scans the search strings which were used to get to your blog.
I’ve listed 6 reasons why Chitika is one of the more popular ad programs being used by bloggers today.
1. It’s easy to install.
All you have to do is copy a small string of code into your template and you’re good to go (having some idea about HTML helps though).
2. Chitika allows you to optimize your ads.
You can edit: title color, text color, border color and URL color. This helps to synergize your ads into your blog.
3. I like images.
Chitika automatically displays relevant images next to the ads (images are a great way to increase click-through rates).
Google Adsense offers this as well but they do NOT allow images next to your advertisements for fear that they might somehow encourage the user to click the ads. *head scratch? I’m pretty sure that’s the idea.
4. Mo’ Money (relatively speaking)
By allowing major customizations, placing images next to the ads, and using a more refined search algorithm, Chitika’s click-through-rate is typically higher than that of Adsense. This means higher revenues for both advertiser and publisher.
5. Ad-sense-n-Chit-i-ka—sitt-in-in-a-tree
Many bloggers use Chitika in addition to AdSense. Chitika has several different suggestions for how to incorporate both programs and where to place ads. Check out their 16 page Adsense & Chitika Guide.
6. Chitika learns!
The ad service uses a content and behavior-based feedback loop that intelligently learns, over time, what products are working best for your blog.
One more cool feature
What if you have a page on your blog with no text? It’s just full of videos or flash. Well, Adsense is gonna have a tough time finding relevant ads to display.
Why?
Since Adsense uses the content of a page to display ads, the Adsense crawler is unable to find any text; making it more difficult to display relevant ads. They are not able analyze the video, they can only check out the description of the video, the title, the tags or the comments. In many cases, these are inaccurate methods to find relevancy.
Why is Chitika different?
Remember that Chitika displays relevant ads by analyzing the tiny search string which reveals what the visitor was actually looking for. No need for page text! Chitika ads on text-less pages will still be extremely targeted to visitors.
In Other Words
I see Chitika as yet another example of how Internet marketing is evolving and growing into a more refined and legitimate industry; allowing even the greenest bloggers to start making money. They took what Google did with Adsense and made it better.
Can’t wait to see what Google comes up with next!
[Rating: 4/5]
How would you rate Chitika?
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